Excerpt from Colonial Questions Pressing for Immediate Solution, in the Interest of the Nation and the Empire (From the "Leith Herald" September, 1868.) "I will proceed now to state my views on the great questions that occur to my mind, although, perhaps, they do not assume in the popular view all the importance I assign them. I will speak of the British Empire as a whole. I look upon the face of the globe, and I find this is the day of great Empires. We have near us the great Empire of France, and a little further distance away the newly-constituted great empire of Germany. We have beyond that the great Empire of Russia; and we have, more formidable still, the great nation of the United States of America. (Hear, hear.) Now, if the United Kingdom is to maintain its ground - to stand on an equal footing with these great Empires - I think we must not forget that it is necessary to maintain our magnitude also. We are possessed of vast territories, but, for good or for ill, these territories are widely scattered over various parts of the world. We are not so compact as any of these four Empires I have mentioned. Well, if we cannot be compact by being one great land, we may be compact by means of cordial unions between Britain and her Colonies. (Loud cheers.) The British people, as a nation, have done, I believe, most ample justice to the Colonists that have left our shores and settled in our valuable territories; but we have, as I apprehend, been too generous or too confiding. We have not stipulated, in return for the protection we afford them - for the powers we have conferred upon them - that these favours shall be at all reciprocated, by furnishing a fair quota of the men and part of the money that may be necessary for defence, and perhaps to fight the battles of the Empire. (Cheers.) Nay, we have been so extremely liberal that, whilst we have removed the protection in which they formerly revelled, we have allowed them to institute a new kind of protection injurious to ourselves. Their own manufactures they protect, and they exclude, by high duties, the manufactures of the Mother Country. (Hear, hear.) It appears to me the time has come when we ought to consolidate the British Empire, and unite this country and these Colonies by some system of federation, or some system of union, so that the great mass then will work together and act together, they and we finding the common p;fund of men and money requisite for Imperial purposes, and thus removing all prejudice that might exist in our minds against them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.